Beddit Sleep Monitor review

Almost exactly one year since its over-achieving
crowd-funding campaign, the Beddit sleep monitor is available to buy. A
wearable you don’t wear it at all, it drew just over half a million dollars of
support on Indiegogo with the promise of measuring your heart rate, your
breathing rate and, ultimately, the quality of your unconscious downtime.

We wanted to tell you what we made of this $149 device but
we thought we'd sleep on it first.

Beddit: Design

There's really very little to it straight out of the box.
The largest portion by far is the 65cm-long, 3cm-wide, flexible, adhesive
sensor strip from which you peel the paper on the back and stick across your
bed. It comes off a bit like big, flat PCI computer cables that you’d find
inside a PC and ours wasn't all that willing to play ball when we attempted to
remove the crinkles from where it had been bundled in the box, as per the
instructions. Nonetheless, that didn't seem to upset its functions at all.

It's up to you whether you want to place it directly under
your bed sheet or beneath a mattress protector. We tried it both ways. It was
still able to do most of the job when there was an extra few millimetres of
linen but it did mean that Beddit wasn't so good at detecting the times that we
woke up in the night. Either way, it was never uncomfortable to sleep on nor
really detectable at all, despite the fact that it cuts across the mattress at
chest level.

The sensor can be moved but there is a warning in the
instructions that it will eventually lose its stick. Apparently that's okay
though, because you can always replace the adhesive strip with a piece of
double-sided sticky tape. We're not that impressed with the idea of having to
get all Blue Peter on its ass but, fortunately, we moved it around three or
four times in our tests and didn't notice any degradation.

Beddit: Set up

At the end of the sensing strip, and designed to hang down
along the edge of the mattress, is the computational gubbins of the device. It
felt a little odd setting this thing up to pop out like that but you'll only
need a tiny bit of duvet to spare for it to be hidden beyond sight. Out of the
unit comes a wire with a USB plug on the end that jams into an adapter and into
the mains.

Now, we're not exactly sure how we feel about sleeping on
something that's plugged into our electricity supply. Yes, it's convenient and
it means no battery issues but what if – and, yeah, we're going to say it –
what if you accidentally wee the bed?

“Like any electrical device, there is an electrocution
hazard if you get Beddit wet while it is plugged in,” reads the manual. Not the
most comforting of words.

Now, it's been a very long time since that kind of accident
happened in our lives but why live on the edge like those crazy electric
blanket people? There's also the possibility of getting one's bedside glass of
water spilled over oneself and said wired up Beddit device.

Are these events likely to occur? Well, not really, no, but
why roll the dice in the first place? You get the picture.

Beddit: How it works

If we knew exactly how the Beddit sensor managed to get
readings of your heart rate and your respiration on a flexi-strip through your
bedsheets, then we'd probably be millionaires too. The fact is that we don't
and it doesn't really matter. The point is that it just works and works really
very well.

All you need to do as the user is download the Beddit app to
either an Android or iOS device, pair it with the sensor over Bluetooth and
then hit the button on your phone to start recording. Now, this doesn't mean
that Beddit will assume that you're asleep from that moment. Between readings
of your breathing and your pulse, it figures out when you've dropped off.

When you wake up in the morning, it's then a case of heading
back to your phone to turn off the recording session and you'll be presented
with a summary of how your night went including periods of deeper and lighter
sleep, times when you woke up, occasions when you got out of bed and how your
breathing and heart rate changed throughout the session.

Your other option is to use Beddit's Smart Alarm
system. The idea behind it is to rise in
the morning feeling as refreshed as possible. You set the time that you need to
wake up by and Beddit will give you a shout at the moment it deems most
suitable in the 30 minutes preceding. And that's when you're naturally sleeping
at your lightest.

Did we feel more refreshed waking up at 6.45 instead of 7am?
Not really. Personally, we'd rather sleep as long as we can no matter what and
that's what the professionals advise as well.

Beddit: Accuracy

Beddit doesn't claim to be medical standard in terms of
accuracy and we don't think it is. It felt like it got things right most nights
but it's hard to say precisely because of obvious reasons. The general picture
seems close enough to make comparisons from one evening to another, though, and
so judge good and bad sleeping patterns.

It takes a night or two to get over the awareness that
something's watching you while you sleep, and that can cause a bit of anxiety –
not the best emotion when you're supposed to be at your most relaxed.
Generally, though, we're fairly convinced by what Beddit is able to do.

What it can't manage is to differentiate dream sleep from
non-dream sleep, nor can it give you a break down of exactly which of the five
stages of sleep you're in at any moment but it's certainly clear enough to tell
the times when our slumber was deeper than others.

If you think you have a sleep problem it seems like a
decent, if slightly expensive way of getting some kind of realistic measure of
the facts.

It's expensive because you're still going to have to see a
specialist and get hold of some medical grade equipment should the problem
persist. It's also expensive because there are other sleep trackers – okay, far
less impressive ones – that you could use instead, but they have all the
activity and fitness functions too. Beddit is for sleep and sleep only.

Beddit: App and dashboard

The Beddit app is something of a frustration. On the one
hand, it's a work of graphical user-interface beauty; right out of the top
draw. You get very neat bar charts, line graphs and chronological displays of
how long you slept for, your heart rate, how many breaths per second and some
kind of hypnogram of your sleep cycles through the night.

The trouble is that you can't drill down into any of it.
Instead, it's put together as a sleep score based upon how many hours kip
you've said you'd like to get each night, and that's rather typical of Beddit.
It's all slightly headless. We're not the experts. You tell us how much sleep
we should be getting or whether we need to cut down on caffeine, go to bed
earlier or whatever it is that we're supposed to be doing to feel better.

The app does have tips and suggestions but they don't seem
tailored to the user in any way. Some kind of online dashboard and a way of
integrating this data with the rest of our quantified selves is what's needed
but presumably that will come. The other option is a deeper sleep analysis that
can indicate exactly what each of us might need to change.

In the States, Misfit seems to have taken Beddit under its
wing, so expect some link up with Shine and Flash activity data. Our concern
would still be that there's little in the way of sleep coaching, though, and
only really the measuring of our shut-eye instead.

Beddit Sleep Monitor

By Misfit

It's really quite impressive what Beddit can measure given how simple the device appears. It's no hassle to set up and it's perfectly easy to forget about it once you have. It's also streets ahead of what you'll find inside most smartwatches and fitness bands that also happen to monitor sleep. You don't need to wear it, you don't need to charge it and you don't need to tell it when you've gone to sleep or woken up either. Better still, it seems to have an accurate enough grasp of how much deep versus light sleep you're getting.
Sadly, though, it's not quite the complete package. The biggest concern is that, after you've woken up each morning and seen your sleep score, there's a bit of a full stop. At the time of writing, there's no integration with other health and wellness dashboards and the actual sleep coaching is far too minimal. Ultimately, the technology of the hardware is right where it needs to be but the interpretation of all that cleverly captured data isn't.

1 Comment

07-Jan-2016 8:12 pm

jonio says:

This product has everything going for it. Ease of use, you don't even know it's there. After using it for a week or so I believe it has helped my sleep and I love finding out every morning how I slept and then I can understand what I need to get a good nights sleep.